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Off-The-Shelf Online Music Stores

jpkunst writes "The Chicago Sun-Times and C|Net news.com report about a new product from Loudeye Digital Media Solutions and Microsoft: pre-fab online music stores for companies who want to join the digital music goldrush. I wonder when this bubble is going to burst."

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  1. Yeah, reminds me of the good old days. by aclarke · · Score: 5, Interesting
    At the company I used to work for we built a prefab online CD sales store in 1999. I think our client got around 60 clients running the site before they went belly up. It was a fun project - all the sites were run off a single data/code base with a syndicated industry information populating templates so each site had the same content but looked completely different.

    But back to business ideas: it seems the first wave was taking an existing idea (music stores) and putting "internet" in front of it. Now the idea is taking an existing "internet" idea (online music stores) and making it "digital" (digital online music store).

    Go figure.

  2. Re:Remember Netscape? by Unoti · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, but Microsoft plays a pretty mean game of catch-up.

    Witness: the internet. Back in the day, Microsoft was promoting MSN as a non-internet alternative. TCP/IP wasn't even in Windows. Once they saw that the networking was going IP, they played catch-up pretty well.

    Witness: Internet Explorer. Netscape was dominating the browser market for a long time. When Internet Explorer came out, it was terrible technologically. Microsoft was playing catch-up. It seemed ridiculous for Microsoft, this upstart in the internet world, to try to take on Netscape. Netscape had a huge lead.